Just a heads-up if you need subtitles, for me and apparently many others with Jellyfin the subs get easily out of sync. The issue in Github[0] has been open for 2.5 years and seems dead.. Only option seems to be re-transcoding and burning the subtitles into the video (which is an option, but consumes some system resources).
Not saying this is not an issue but we've easily watched several hundreds of different releases, all with subtitles, never had the out-of-sync problem appear in Jellyfin and not in other players (that is, sometimes subs are just inherently off-sync to the video file if it's from a different release etc).
The other subs-related annoyances (takes time to appear; transcoding/DS behave differently) appear in web client only and not when playing trough a "proper" player (mpv-shim/kodi/whathaveyou), which also support convenient timing adjustments. Maybe switching clients is a work-around that works for you. jellyfin-mpv-shim would be the smoothest if you just want to continue issuing local playback ("cast") from the web interface.
Typically because you are trying to play media with codecs that aren't supported by your browser, and transcoding is either not working or working suboptimally. Native clients (like MPV, VLC, or the desktop app) tend to have better codec support and support decoding the native media stream directly.
Some people work around this by making sure they only store supported codecs, either by being selective with media or offline transcoding (which can be instrumented with software like https://github.com/HaveAGitGat/Tdarr).
There's nothing "magic" here. Your options regardless of software are inherently:
1. Make sure to only store and stream supported media (as explained above)
2. Do the decoding and playback in a capable client (like mentioned above you can make it fairly seamlessly with the web client together with jellyfin-mpv-shim)
3. Live transcoding (may require tweaking drivers and codecs on your server; significantly increases server hardware requirements and load)
The above linked github issue seems to be about problems playing back SRT subtitle formats which are not supported by browsers, so there is still subtitle 'transcoding' going on.
I don't have any issues watching subtitled material straight through but I think I've seen it after skipping around and the workaround was to close the video and reopen it so it resumes from the right spot - not ideal but not a show-stopper at least.
I’ve experienced this with some streaming—HBO Max in particular seems to have problems with out of sync CC on some but not all of their programming. Last Week Tonight is usually about a second or so behind with the captions vs the audio, and I think some other original programming has similar issues.
FWIW I've never had trouble with the subtitles in Jellyfin on the Roku app, or on Infuse (AppleTV client). In fact I've practically never had any kind of trouble at all, aside from my Roku devices not supporting h.265 encoding.
Android TV (a Shield, in my case) did have bad audio sync problems with several common audio codecs. My bad for trying to cheap out, should have just gotten the AppleTV to begin with. Bites me in the ass nearly every time I try to save money in that way.
VLC has the features to adjust subtitle timing. I've tried a few other players and media centre type options but always found them a poor dit for the few things I like to fiddle with from time to time.
With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles? I have a neighbor who watches every movie with subtitles. I've never understood it. When I ask him, it's usually something about seeing the words, but he's not hard of hearing, and they listen to their movies outrageously loud anyway. In any event, to me, it detracts from the cinematography, and absent some handicap, I can't understand why you'd want subtitles. But I'm fully aware there's a sizable contingent that prefers watching movies with subtitles. Why is that?
I'm mildly hard of hearing and the poor audio mixes in movies and shows are very difficult for me. For example with House of the Dragon, there is no volume where I can understand all the words in quiet conversations without blowing my ears out in battle scenes. Fiddling with the volume constantly is annoying. I've looked for dynamic volume features, but my TV doesn't have them and I'm not interested in a new TV or sound system.
So it's subtitles — especially for shows with poor audio mixes, where people whisper, talk quietly, or with heavy accents.
I don't know what's going on with that, it's gotten so bad these past few years. I'm not hard of hearing but there are regularly shows where I can't hear the dialog at all because of the mix. Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.
I've just got a 7.1 system and suddenly I don't need subtitles nearly as much. I suspect that's the main issue - mixes are done for multi-channel, and if you have fewer channels they get mashed together. Because music, sound effects and background noise come out of multiple channels, and voice tends to come out of the central channel only, it gets lost in the mix.
> Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.
It is a known issue: [1]
> Every time a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out [...] one complaint which seems almost universal at this point is that the sound mixing in many of his movies has resulted in dialogue that is frequently muffled and sometimes even downright inaudible.
Obviously needed in that scenario. That doesn't explain my neighbor, the Marvel Universe fan, but maybe he's an anomaly. I just had the sense there were a bunch of people out there like him who watched movies with subtitles as a matter of course.
I don’t need them for old films (pre 1990), but it makes it so much easier to tell what’s being said in newer ones. Clear enunciation gave way to stylistic accents after that - also, the sound is mixed with way too much range (works okay if you have cinema grade sound).
I use subtitles in everything I watch, especially new movies, because they seem to lower the dialogue so much and explosions are so loud. It helps me keep the volume at a decent overall level and I won't miss anything.
Sometimes we keep the volume low because the baby is sleeping. Sometimes we enjoy talking over movies, and subtitles can help us not miss things.
But the biggest reason is that house acoustics suck. Sitting in a drywall box is not the best thing for intelligibility or sonic appreciation. I used to operate a small music studio out of a house, and I spent more than a trivial amount of money to make the acoustics decent for such work. I daydream about doing similar treatments in my living room, but I don't make my living doing audio work anymore, so it's hard to justify the time and expense. So I turn on subtitles or put on headphones.
Because, even though I'm a native English speaker, I can't fckn understand half of what people are saying either because of ascents, other noise, not understanding context, and generally having a hard time correctly decoding speech unless it's the only thing happening. Maybe it's a symptom of some sort of non-neuro-typical trait.
Also, I've always had a tendancy to hear egg corns where most people hear the correct words.
Plenty of people watch movies in languages that they don't speak. Probably half the movies I see are foreign. Subtitles are obviously necessary in this case, and even if watching foreign films weren't extremely common, working subtitle support would be crucial for accessibility reasons.
I grew up watching many movies in multiple languages I only partially understood (my mother tongues so to speak) and, as I grew older, other languages I don't understand at all. The habit of using subtitles kind of stuck. Plus a lot of English language media I see these days have is increasingly various accents in them. For example, I consume a decent amount of British shows where some accents can be tough to understand as someone unfamiliar with them. Even some American accents can be tough decipher for my Canadian ears.
Honestly, I think after some point I have gotten so used to them that they drift in the background and don't distract the way you may feel.
That being said, I understand where you are coming from, I am quite particular about the style of subtitles. I would like them to be white, proportional font, transparent background and black drop shadow/outline. Most other styles I find distracting but that may be because I am used to this particular style. For example I don't like Youtube's default translucent background for the subtitles.
My hearing is mostly OK though a little spotty especially when tired or otherwise not entirely paying attention. Some sound mixes make it quite hard to clearly make out voices in some situations, so I occasionally need subs for that. Also I sometimes watch TV while on the treadmill. Sometimes I prefer subtitles to headphones, especially with the noisy old treadmill I've got at home.
I also have some friends for whom English is a second or third language, despite being very good with the language generally they sometimes have trouble, for instance with strong accents or bad sound mixes, so find subtitles (in English) useful.
Not every video is mixed well, and audio compression makes dialogue difficult for me to parse. I have the same difficulty on the phone, too, because of the speech compression.
I used to watch movies on my laptop, and I've not needed subtitles after getting comfortable with English. But now I have a proper speaker setup (stereo though) and the fact is that the mixing can be horrendous. Someone is talking normally and then – BRA-AH - some audio effects or shooting happens, and you miss part of the conversation. And some accents are just about unintelligible for me. So, I just add subtitles when I want to follow the conversation.
Subtitles, in addition to letting me watch content in many languages I don't speak, liberates me from poor audiomixing decisions, which seem to be getting ever more common.
> With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles? I have a neighbor who watches every movie with subtitles. I've never understood it.
Not that it will help, but I have three kids and they ALL do this. I have no idea why they do it, none of them have any issues with their hearing so it makes zero sense.
Personally i find it both annoying and frustrating. I can hear just fine, and having the words on the screen is distracting but they refuse to watch TV without them on?
I like watching TV quietly, so others are not disturbed. Also, I absorb information better when I read it. Both reasons why I like subtitles, and I suspect many others do as well. I have no issues with my hearing. I don't like large subtitles, either, but if I can set them to be small, they don't bother me.
Lots of shows these days have awful audio mixing, going from extremely quiet to extremely loud, and mumbling actors. I use subtitles for these. I don't even notice them on, but if I miss a word I can glance down and see it
I'm Deaf (90-100db loss) and while I can hear most things with hearing aids on... I can't make out the dialogue. I think I would miss about 80% of what's being said without the assistance of subtitles/captions.
Using yt-dlp + Jellyfin has been a revelation for serving my kids safe, vetted video content. You can even download an entire YouTube channel at once. The kids aren’t at an age where they need that much novelty, so watching old favorites again and again is fine by them.
I should probably also mention that we’re teaching them Chinese, so having an all-Chinese kids media library is invaluable. No English ads to break the immersion - no ads, period.
each youtube-dl.batchfile is in a directory that corresponds to an emby library, and is a plain text file where each line is a link to something that yt-dlp understands (usually a youtube channel or playlist). The youtube-dl.config contains (among other things)
--batch-file youtube-dl.batchfile
to point to the batchfile, and
--download-archive youtube-dl-archive.txt
so that I don't re-download videos I've already retrieved, and also because it gives me a super quick way to exclude certain videos: either I can just go in and delete the file for a video I don't like (and instead of downloading it again, yt-dlp sees the ID in the archive and doesn't even bother trying to download it), or if I know of some I don't want it ever to download I can just pre-emptively put their IDs in the dl-archive file.
So now when I find a channel I want to download for the kids, I just drop a line in a batchfile and either kick off the cron job by hand or wait.
Another thing I do, on the topic of vetting content for the kids to watch on jellyfin/emby:
tl;dr: ios shortcut -> flask app -> yt-dlp.
I wrote a tiny flask app that runs somewhere on my network, which takes POSTs with two parameters, a link and a name. It passes the link to yt-dlp and then renames the resulting file to "{name}.mp4". (It then also POSTs to emby's endpoint telling it to rescan the library.)
I made a janky ios shortcut does
"receive any input from share sheet" ->
"get urls from {shortcut input}" ->
"ask for {text} with {file name}" ->
"get contents of {my flask app's URL}"
the last step takes the URL from step 2 and the file name from step 3 and uses those as the POST body. I named this shortcut 'ytdlp'.
So now I'm looking at nearly anything on my phone (youtube, twitter, it even works with tiktok/imgur links from a browser because I only view those from a browser, not their app), hit 'share', choose 'ytdlp' and give it a name, and a couple seconds later that video is ready to watch in emby.
I've archived hundreds of videos this way for the kids over the last couple years.
I’ve done basically the same thing but instead of a custom flask app I have an instance of n8n.io running on a raspberry pi. You just set up an automation to receive a webhook and run a shell command with input from the payload.
Another cool little automation is a webhook from Plex when playback starts turns on the hue lights behind the TV
We're trying to do the same with our kids-- finding kids friendly stations AND appropriate Chinese media. Could you share some of your favorite channels?
- 叶罗丽 – Yeluoli, a show about magical dolls and fighting evil
- 小花仙 – Xiaohuaxian, a story about a girl with a magic bracelet
- 绿野仙踪 – The Wizard of Oz: a favorite of my wife's from her childhood. It’s an anime remix of the Wizard of Oz that was originally in Japanese, but she watched it as a kid in China
- 还珠格格 – A period drama about a fake princess
- 白蛇 – An animated movie about a demon snake and the snake catcher who finds her – EDIT – I forgot this one’s not a kids’ show. There is definitely a sex scene. That said, it’s pretty subtle and it went over our kids’ heads.
Not parent, but there is an option in settings that allows you to unpin (and therefore have to dig through menus to find) any media source on both Android and the web client.
I use Jellyfin somewhat reluctantly because of playlist management. If anyone knows an easy way to convert between directories and playlists (as in one directory represents one playlist) I’d be very grateful.
I got so annoyed when Plex started bombarding me with spam for third-rate streaming services I'd never heard of. If I wanted to use a streaming service I wouldn't be using a home server to do it.
Jellyfin is better in numerous ways but I can only get it to work sporadically with my Denon HEOS speakers, though it turned out I could just copy some music to a USB stick and stick it in my receiver to make a music server that works with HEOS.
FWIW you can now disable the other streaming services, they annoy me as well and just today found a way to do it ( Settings -> Online Media Sources -> set all to 'Disabled' ).
Plex for me is for accessing a specific server. Or maybe one more if I added it. It shouldn’t require internet access and shouldn’t break if internet goes down and the server is on my LAN.
It isn’t for grabbing some stuff off the Plex site.
But I love my Plex!
I can search for basically any movie, click "add to watchlist" and some magic happens behind the scenes and an hour or two later; that movie is in my library, ready to watch with subtitles and all.
All my work buddies have the same system setup as well, so we're all sharing libraries to create an insane network of media, fit for any taste.
Have a docker-compose to share? I have Plex and love it too, but that "add to watchlist" type setup seems very interesting. Any links to point me in the right direction?
I used to use sonarr and radarr in the past but used those directly, not via Plex, and to be honest I sometimes ran into issues with them but generally they worked fine.
It's a clever way to do this without leaving Plex. I've used Ombi or PlexRequests in the past but they weren't my favorite and I finally gave up and used the sonarr/radarr UI directly.
Yeah, with Plex things can be added to the Watchlist directly from the apps (including on the TV). It has made a big difference in uptake with my users compared to getting them to log into a website.
Piracy. Specifically a bittorrent back-end that grabs torrents from a curated or auto-generated list then combined with data from a service like TVDB to make a nice front-end.
Oh, man - Jeff is a giant in the raspberry pi and adjacent homelab and NAS spaces. I met him at events in the Drupal space, where he was a maintainer at the time, just showing off his first "bramble" (pi based kubernetes cluster). He is my favorite kind of open sourcer: genuinely curious with a love for explaining/helping people. Oh, and he's often on HN. Hi, Jeff!
I also knew him from then, back in my days of administering thousands of macs, his roles were a godsend.
Now I see him here all the time doing cool stuff with Pis and drives. I hope I bump into him one day, as our interests heavily cross, and he seems like a really nice guy.
On-demand is discouraged and bad for the swarm, sorry.
Though with a fair connection the delay before a full download shouldn't be too long. With a nice native frontend to Jellyfin/Plex (ex. Infuse) maybe you don't really need that? Maybe, just asking.
There shouldn't be any reason for on-demand to be bad for the swarm, given that the downloading node continues to seed afterwards, no? If the user can watch the content because it's downloaded on-demand and automatically lets it stay on the drive until a ratio has been reached, isn't it win-win for both sides?
Stremio + torrentio + a debrid service (Real-Debrid, Premiumize, AllDebrid, etc.) is almost perfect for what you're asking. There's no personalized recommendation algorithm but you can scroll trough several categories/genres or even install/make your own add-ons for that.
A debrid service allows you to bypass the download limits of file-sharing websites (like 4shared, MEGA, etc.) without needing to have an premium account on each website.
They also provide functionally similar to seedboxes were they download torrents and then you download them directly from their servers. A lot of torrents are cached already (someone tried to download them already) and that's the functionality that's useful for Kodi or Stremio streaming as it allows you to stream media easily.
I just started using Jellyfin and have been loving it! It works great and it has an impressively professional and polished UI for an open source project. The Jellyfin team is doing great work!
I want to move to Jellyfin, but the network effect is strong for me. I'm in a pool of about 10 of my former coworkers and we've all pooled our Plexes together for years. Moving to Jellyfin would cause me to lose access to that.
I migrated from Emby to Jellyfin pretty soon after the fork, and Jellyfin seemed a bit wobbly fit the first year and a bit, but then really kicked off and it's been stable for me for a long time.
Primarily used through Android TV app connecting to a docker instance of the server.
It's interesting that he talks about anti-free software FUD with Plex vs Jellyfin, but Emby vs Jellyfin is pretty illuminating; I have a paid license of the former, and it's pretty telling that not only do they lag in many features, the support is remarkably for being unpleasant and rude, which is an interesting choice for paying customers.
Even where they have a nominal advantage, such as clients, they're often remarkably limited in terms of things like Dolby playback or performance with UHD, so it's not clear what you're paying for.
I'm in the process of moving from plex to jellyfin (even though I have a lifetime plex pass).
plex has some nicer things
1) skip intro built in and usable in all the clients I use (on jellyfin you can add it as a plugin, but not supported universally in clients)
2) the UI of plex is so much nicer/cleaner. Not a huge deal for me, but would be a show stopper for others
3) in all honesty, but much better library management (at a simple level, the ability to see what hasn't been "matched"/"identified")
probably more, but I'm just at the start of my migration
why did I switch? because jellyfin has 2 major features that plex seems to have no intention of adding
1) the ability to tonemap DV content to SDR (plex can tonemap HDR10 to SDR, but not DV, it be interesting in future if jellyfin would have the ability to tonemap DV to HDR10)
2) the abilty to have "external" transcoders. i.e. one can add cheap intel boxes (under $100) to get quicksync transcoding to an already existing installation. Can make it easy and cheap to scale.
I've tried a few times with every alternative to Plex out there, but none of them seem to do a decent job handling the wide variety of video content in my Plex library. I've tried Emby, Jellyfin, and everything else.
For someone starting from scratch, sure, pick whatever you want. But to migrate a set of gigantic libraries, ouch.
The last one I tried was Emby, sometimes during the pandemic, and it just flat-out didn't come up with a number of movies that matched the number of movie files in the directly I pointed it at. It also seemed to mis-match or fail to match many of them. Admittedly, I have a decent percentage of foreign-language movies, mostly in filenames with their English-translated titles, but Emby would often pick an English-language movie that did not match the filename exactly, while ignoring a Korean (for example) movie that did.
IIRC, it was even worse when it came to TV. Fortunately, I was running it side-by-side with Plex, so after about a week of trying to get it to recognize my entire collection, I just gave up and deleted it.
Detection in Emby works but is... odd. I have Premiere.
There's still definitely a "right way" to organize your library, but detection and settings have massively improved over the past year (I'm on 4.8.0.13).
Probably 15% of my library has had to be manually identified, and 70% is non-English. Prioritizing the metadata sources helps a lot. Definitely a labor of love.
You can use something like Radarr to put your movie collection into sane and consistent filenames and directory structures that apps like Jellyfin can parse well and store metadata in without issues.
You can do the same thing with Sonarr for shows, and pretty much any ID3 tag editor with batch renaming for music.
Both apps seem to have better identification and normalization features than Jellyfin does.
I happen to believe that my current movie and tv collection already use sane and consistent filenames. Certainly they're sane enough for Plex (and most are set by the Scene). If you're suggesting a directory per movie, we disagree on what is sane.
If you go this route you should set it up for sonarr media directories to include the initial release year. This helps identify series with the same or similar names, like The Office, or House of Cards.
I'm still somewhat unclear precisely what problem Jellyfin and Plex are supposed to solve. If you combine Jellyfin with something liks Radarr/Sonarr and Kodi then what do you need Jellyfin for? You could just cut out the middleman and connect Kodi to Radar/Sonarr directly.
I moved away from Kodi over to Plex (later Jellyfin) for the following reasons:
- Jellyfin lets me keep track of what i watched regardless of where. I can watch half a show in my office, and resume where i left off in my family room.
- Jellyfin fully supports multiple users, so my kids can have their own profiles, there own "in progress" management, etc.
- There is no need to setup anything like NFS/Samba to share the library, jellyfin connects to the central server which stores the media and runs the jellyfin server.
Some of this can be done in Kodi, via a mysql connection but it is baked into jellyfin.
If i was starting out building a home media server from scratch, jellyfin would be high on my list.
Jellyfin also has much better metadata handling / downloading and the web UI is great for streaming to anything without needing to install a client.
It's worth mentioning that, if you love / are invested in Kodi, there's a jellyfin plugin for it that will allow you to access the JF library directly. It supports realtime transcoding for stuff that the browser (or client) doesn't know how to play.
A lot of the features that work "out of the box" in JF are technically possible to add to Kodi through existing plugins, but that's a lot more care and feeding than just installing JF and connecting to it.
Think of Jellyfin as a multi-user, centralized version of Kodi. Thanks to this, you get the ability to access (and give others access to) your Jellyfin instance remotely from virtually any device.
Kodi can serve as either a Jellyfin client or as a local replacement. One thing to note is that the Kodi plugin ecosystem is much larger than that of Jellyfin, or any other media server solution for that matter.
Ha! I have the same question except for Kodi. Never could figure it out.
My use case(s) for Plex:
1. I have media on my HD. Plex organizes it, figures out what show/movie it is, gets relevant metadata, and remembers how much I've watched it.
2. I then watch it on my TV. I don't want to watch it on my PC.
3. It lets me watch said media when I'm away from home (e.g. from a hotel room when I'm traveling). This is critical for me and what got me on to Plex.
4. It lets me share media with other users.
5. DVR: I pick the shows I like, and it records them for me. This is critical for me as well.
I keep my media organized well organized in a folder structure.
I either watch it from my PC, or my TV (with Kodi).
I don't want it organized for me. I don't want to "search" for the show/movie that I want to watch.
I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list.
I don't like/want all the Database back-end stuff that gets done in plex/jellyfin (IMDB lookups, rotten tomatoes reviews, etc.)
I use Jellyfin for my kids shows.
I use Kodi for my TV.
And the thing I despise the most, I dont' want to rename/restructure/reorganize 100TB of media just so JellyFin can auto-guess incorrectly the movie/tv show/season/episode.
All of the kids crap? Dumped into a single folder and Jellyfin guessed most of it. The stuff it got wrong, I don't care about.
My stuff, that's been carefully curated over years? Even if I just feed jellyFin the content 1 directory at a time, it can't get seasons/episodes straight.
I don't watch my media when I'm away from home.
I don't share my media.
I only have to curate maybe 1/200 shows or movies. Radarr/Sonarr do that for me, and very well. Filebot works out that 1/200 for me, I just have a folder I dump to, and a containerised version sees it and fixes it.
I spent many hours previously curating, but as a human it's very inefficient when IMDB, TheTVDB, etc all have the info you need and can almost always get it right.
> I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list.
Been a while since I used Jellyfin, but you can set Plex to show it in list view. I would be surprised if Jellyfin didn't have that capability.
I think Kodi covers 1 and 2. Maybe Plex is slightly better at connecting to stuff like Chromecast / Smart TV? Those kind of walled devices aren't to my taste so I haven't tried them, well that and they didn't exist when I set things up.
Do you use Plex as a client in all cases?
There's a decent chance I just don't get it because I'm excessively particular in how I want things set up. Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me. As is granting a third party access to files on my local network. So I've built my own solutions for pretty much any feature Plex has, except possibly user friendliness (which is the most likely reason I may use jellyfin, but not for personal use).
I use Plex on my Roku so I can watch my media on my TV instead of on a monitor. Occasionally (pretty rarely), I use it on my Android for the same reason.
And I take the Roku with me whenever I travel so I can watch things wherever I go.
> Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me.
I don't use Plex to play videos on my PC. The experience is better on my TV, so I don't consume entertainment media via my monitor. To watch random video files on my PC, I use mplayer.
So how do you watch the media on your PC remotely?
Might not be the answer you’re looking for, but Apple TV + Infuse is a fantastic media player. It has support for basically every codec so your server doesn’t have to be beefy — you can just direct stream everything. I stream full 4K UHD rips this way. And it supports Jellyfin, naturally.
No, unfortunately, it’s not a great player. Speed wise and aesthetically, yes, but codecs…
Blu-rays with Atmos use TrueHD Atmos, while streaming Atmos only supports Dolby Digital Atmos. Infuse does not support TrueHD Atmos, and there is no way to switch between the two, so giving up Atmos for the base 5.1 or 7.1 is your only option.
Similar case with Dolby Vision. Blu-rays use Profile 7, Apple TV only supports Profiles 5 and 8.4. So no actual Dolby Vision streams for you, just HDR10.
Jellyfin's login system is a hot mess and makes it a non-starter for family use.
Instead of going with the time tested login (saved) and then profile chooser (pin locked) they've decided that they would treat it like a PC with nothing but individual users. As a sort of after thought, they put in detecting if the user is connecting from the same network or not and letting a pin be used in place of the password.
First Joe User has no idea if they're on an internal network or not and the UI doesn't disclose this (probably wise from a security standpoint). So the result is users just defaulting to using their long password (my security requirement) all the time. Inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker per se. Unless you, like me, don't appreciate hearing teenagers bitch every time they have to re-type their password.
This issue is compounded greatly by the fact that the Roku app, and as far as I can tell, any other shared app situation, lets you either log the user out when closing the app, or save the login for some amount of time. In the first case we're back to the pain in the ass of every user typing their long password every single time they want to use the app (remember unsophisticated users who default to which method works every time). In the latter case in order to keep play history and such the previous user has to be logged out via a series of menus and then the new user has to type their long password circling back to where we started.
They have implemented a profile page, but the profile page is BEFORE the login phase. Which means I had to advise my family to pick fake names and nondescript images for profile images because that profile page is accessible to anyone who finds their way to the page on the internet. Quite frankly absurd.
I tried to outline this concern in the Matrix chat and the general take was "typing your password isn't that hard!" or responses that seemed to be strongly implying re-working this process would just be too hard or time consuming.
I don't doubt the difficulty, but this situation makes an otherwise awesome system entirely unusable for an unsophisticated multi-user configuration.
How puzzling; full rescans take my old i3 server less than five minutes and incremental scans are done in minutes. I wonder what's making the scans so slow for some and so fast for me.
For me, the experience was similar to the Reddit comments. I ran it in a raspberry pi 4 and had media on a USB attached disk. It would take hours, giving no feedback as it progressed. When finished, lots of movies and series would be missing, but there wouldn't be any failure log, so all I could do was inch my way through my whole collection on disk, checking which ones made it in and which didn't. I just gave up and installed Kodi. On the exact same hardware and media, it scanned quickly, giving updates as it went, and told me about failures when it was done.
I have written a telegram bot (via node-red) that is basically a proxy for yt-dlp that allows my mother to download audio only from youtube videos/audiobooks and sort them into jellyfin for later download or to just listen. She has downloaded like 250gb so far and loves it.
There is a TestFlight Swiftfin app that is pretty decent. The only reason I still prefer Infuse (another Apple TV app that works with Jellyfin) is the more polished UI.
Jellyfin + Tailscale is absolutely fucking amazing. It easily replaces everything Plex does without any risk like Plex exposing your network from a bug.
The whole network situation with Plex is totally f'ed. I used Plex for years, must have been ten years ago, and it all worked (how Jellyfin works now). As soon as they did plex.tv/relay, it all stopped working. I run Plex in Docker with Tailscale on the host, I have never managed to get Plex working properly on the Tailscale network.
I have checked, it seems you can put TVs onto Tailscale...so may try Jellyfin again. But I remember subtitles also being buggy and awful scrolling perf...if I can get it on my TV, I would switch back. Plex's networking is just over-engineered trash.
Ultimately after more than two decades of sailing the seas, I landed on a plexshare. I pay $20/month and get everything my heart desires in 4K Remux even, and it's so simple my wife can use it.
The only way I see myself going back to self-hosting the content and media server is if hard drives suddenly become ridiculously cheap, like $100 for 16TB or something crazy like that.
Same. Jellyfin is so close, but scrolling to the middle of a show (even over local network) would take a minute or not work at all at the show would snap back to start. I dislike Plex so much.
Jellyfin has been great for managing my music collection after Google Music was discontinued, and it's also worked great for movies and shows.
It would be great if Jellyfin could manage podcasts, too. There's a healthy client ecosystem for Jellyfin, and I prefer those clients over other podcast clients.
I’ve wanted to love Jellyfin and it looks so nice but I have found for my Home Theater that Kodi is just better. I like Jellyfin for streaming on my iPad and for putting my downloaded tutorials. But Kodi just seems to have a lot more compatibility and handles HDR better. Just my 2 cents.
The nice thing about Jellyfin is that you don't need a special box connected to your TV. Jellyfin has various apps (e.g. WebOS and Roku, iOS, and Android), DLNA, and a web interface. I don't believe Kodi has those things but could be wrong.
They play well enough together. You can use Kodi as a frontend to browse and stream from Jellyfin servers. There are two options depending on the level of integration you want with the Kodi library.
Jellyfin is very poor when it comes to EPG and DVR capabilities. Plex is king here, and is the main reason I paid for the Pass (very cheap for what you get).
The last time I tried it was probably 6 months ago and it was still buggy for lots of basic playback - both on my Android and on my Roku.
Yeah, it's not for you. Tivimate is for IPTV. If I were just using antenna I'd have no problem using Jellyfin for it since there are not that many channels I would have active anyway, and I live between two major TV markets so I get plenty of OTA.
JellyFin would be my server of choice if not for one nagging issue; it doesn't play nice with Chromecast OTB (also, subtitle management is a bit winky, but its been a while so maybe thats changed). Hence I'm still on the ever-declining Emby still.
Over the last decade or so I've switched between Kodi (even back when it was XBMC on a literal Xbox [the original]), Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin; currently settled on Jellyfin for maybe a year and a half. I've also had a great experience with Jellyfin and love that it doesn't hide features behind a paywall. I agree that it has caught up with the competitors in terms of necessary features, but it occasionally feels a little buggy or in need of some UX polish. Perhaps one of my free weekends I'll see if I can contribute.
One of the primary features I appreciate that the others have behind a paywall is the ability to download content for offline use. 1 less reason to open up my network's SSH port to the world. The feature is great for trips where connectivity is limited, or just at a friend's house with terribly unreliable wifi.
I run Jellyfin on an Athlon II X4 (12 or 13 years old) with several other self-hosted services. Transcoding anything above 720p causes the entire system to come to a screeching halt, so I've pre-transcoded all of my content with handbrake to allow direct-play 4k content on all my home devices (Firefox, Shield TV, Chromecast, Android client, desktop client).
Does Jellyfin support audio books in a decent way? (I ask for your opinion and expierience - the docs state YES, but it is a huge difference between active support and being competitive with lets say audiobookshelf)
Jellyfin seems to struggle a bit with my anime library when the files don't follow a typical western TV show structure, but I'm otherwise very happy with it!
Huh, anime is my primary use for jellyfin, it seems pretty fine for me with a Show/Season X/SXXEYY - whatever you want.mp4 structure.
The one issue I've had is with Danganronpa but that's because the backing service for data (TheMovieDB) wants to insist that DR3 Future arc is part of DR1 and not related to DR3 Despair arc.
I don't bother renaming files after I download them so they're left looking something like this:
[group] anime name - 01 [fileinfo] [crc32].mkv
This becomes problematic when you have shows like New Game, where the first is stylized as NEW GAME! and the second season is NEW GAME!!. Jellyfin shows them both as the first season of the anime, where as Plex with the Hama TV scanner can distinguish between them.
Consider installing Sonarr. Even if you don't use it to automatically search for episodes (its primary usecase), then you can use it to copy over from your download client to Jellyfin and rename the files to something sane that Jellyfin will always pick up.
Their weird content/metadata detection is also what turns me off. Even just having a sane 'files' view with an arbitrary depth would be fine, bit it just does not work. They don't scan metadata like id3 tags. At least this is how I remember my impression when I tried it a year ago.
Add and remove "--volume" entries as needed. You can have more than one movie or TV library or whatever, which is super-handy if you have kids because you can restrict their accounts to certain libraries. Consider using links from the main libraries to create the kids' libraries, if you want to have everything available, including kid stuff, on your adult account(s), as it's a little cleaner than adding both the adult and kid libraries to a single account. Left side is the host machine where the files actually live, right side is where it's mounted in the container. Replace the left side with whatever's right for your system. Names within the "media" directory in the container are arbitrary, but you will have to add each library in the web UI to make them show up, so it's worth giving them decent names.
Replace the "/opt/docker/...." bits with wherever you want to store the config and cache on the host machine. It'll survive restarts/reboots with everything intact with just those two config-related mounts.
the "--restart=unless-stopped" means you probably don't need to do anything else to get it to come back up on reboots. No messing with systemd or whatever, at least on many distros. Docker will take care of it.
Version number's the latest release, I like to handle that manually so there are no surprises. I think they have a "latest" tag or similar that you can use if you don't care about that and just want it to always run the newest thing.
Pro-tip: the youtube metadata plugin (not included by default) is far less smoothly-functioning than the rest of the system is (and also won't run on that docker image without some light modification—it needs youtube-dlp present) BUT many of the things from Youtube that you might want to watch on a real TV have entries on IMDB or thetvdb, so you can add them as TV shows, which is all-around a much better experience.
I think you can define what you want the "Extras" directory to be called when you set up the library, and that's what it'll look for. "Featurettes" is another common name for that.
If you do this, it'll automatically grab the right metadata like 99% of the time with no intervention.
For TV:
/King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E01.mkv
/King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E02.mkv
(et cetera)
/King of the Hill 1997)/Season 0/S00E05 - The Making of King of the Hill.mp4
You can actually put almost anything you want in the actual episode file names, as long as it has that "SxxExx" pattern in it somewhere.
Again, I think you can use other names for the "specials" folders if you configure it when setting up the library, but they're "S00E01" and so on in thetvdb, so I use "Season 0"
If anything gets the wrong metadata, find its ID on imdb or thetvdb or tmdb or whatever, hit the hamburger menu on the thumbnail for it, click "identify", and enter your id in the matching field. That'll fix it. But this will very rarely happen if your naming is all correct.
[EDIT] Nb. this may not be a great config for transcoding, I'm not sure it'll have access to hardware decode/encode with this. I avoid that by only using frontend devices that can handle all the codecs I have (AppleTV FTW) so nothing's ever transcoded, since my server can't transcode for shit in the best of circumstances, but that may matter to some people.
I wanted to like jellyfin. It seemed like a great option for playing music.
But the 17,000 music tracks in my library crashes the jellyfin server every time I tried to play music.
Plex and Emby phone home all the time (why should they need to do that when all my media is local? No thanks!)
And so I stick with Mythtv[0] (which really seems out of favor with folks these days) which has awesome codec support (I haven't had to transcode anything, it just plays -- probably because ffmpeg is their back end).
It plays my music library, it plays and manages my 10,000+ item video library, supports a real remote control (in my case an Inteset 422[3]) via IR or Wifi.
I can keep my backend (server) (VM with multiple data sources) and frontend (playback/library management) version sync'ed with normal update processes via the appropriate software repositories (in my case, RPM Fusion on Fedora, but other distros[1] have the same).
It doesn't support streaming from Android/IOS/etc, but I just make my libraries externally available via Nextcloud[2], which meets my remote streaming needs.
No, it's not perfect. Yes, the add-on ecosystem is pretty awful. The devs seem much more interested in the DVR functionality (which I don't use) than the video/music library functionality.
That said, it's under active development with regular bug fixes and feature releases and has a fairly active user community.
But there's zero external communication required (unlike Plex or Emby), nor are there any commercial integrations (well, if you want to use the DVR functionality you do need to buy a yearly subscription (IIRC ~USD$15) for the guide data, but I don't use the DVR functionality, so I don't need it).
There certainly are limitations:
1. No streaming apps, but I don't care about that. If I want a streaming client I'll just use my roku;
2. Grabbing video metadata can be a pill if file naming conventions are too different from themoviedb.org and/or thetvdb.com;
3. No direct torrent integrations;
It's not fabulous, but it works for me. And if you just want something to host/play your local media, it's pretty darn good.
Did I mention that I have yet to transcode anything to get video (with or without subtitles) to play?
Okay? I'm sorry you can't use tools as they are intended. I'm sorry you can't fit tools to their purpose. I'm sorry you treat everything like a nail. What do you want me to tell you...?
It's called MythTV. Not MythMusic, or MythMediaJackOfAllTrades. I feel that is intentional per the developers motivations. Similarly, the developers of Jellyfin are primarily motivated by TV and movie sources. I'd love if they better supported music so that my music video library can have proper tags, but I won't grill them since the TV and movie side is quite good, and Navidrome does plenty for me.
> As for the decade, do you work at being a jerk, or does it come naturally?
Imagine being offended over the easiest joke possible. Is this your first time on the internet, kiddo? That was also a joke, don't lose your head.
> I'd point out that jellyfin is a fork of Emby, which is a rebrand of MediaBrowser -- first released in 2000. Mythtv's initial release was in 2004.
Now, imagine if you had the self awareness that your know-it-all tendencies are what make you unlikeable in the real world. You'd get so much further!
> I use emacs too. Does that make me an asshole as well?
I use VIM. Should I have put a trigger warning before telling you? You sure seem sensitive enough to need one.
I made a suggestion to use a tool better suited to the task. Throwing a fit about a stranger's suggestion is entirely up to you.
I've said it a million times before but I'll say it again:
You cannot pay for an experience that rivals Plex (or in this case Jellyfin).
It's not about being cheaper, that ship sailed for me a long time ago, I've easily spent over $10K on hardware alone over the years but being in total control of your media is amazing. Want to share a clip? Just cut it and share it. Want to watch media on any device online or offline? No problem. Want to share with friends/family? Easy.
I buy all my audiobooks on Audible but I rip the DRM off them, put them in Plex, and then listen to them through Prologue (amazing iOS audiobook app) because it gives me full control.
I know this method is not for everyone (it does require a non-zero amount of technical knowledge, though I have set up systems for others that have worked with nearly no issues for years) but it's by far the best watching experience. No ads ever, instant playback, 1 UI/UX to learn, never asking "What service was that show on?", etc.
If there was 1 streaming service that had literally everything and I could pay $300+/mo or so for then I'd probably jump at the chance. Instead you have to piecemeal together a slew of services that all have different UIs/paradigms and they remove/shift around content. I had high hopes for Amazon's "Channels" and Apple TV (The app, not the device, not the service, come on Apple....) but neither really got all the way there for me. I'd even pay each individual company if they gave me (aka Plex) an API to suck down the content without using their apps/websites.
> I have set up systems for others that have worked with nearly no issues for years
The two issues I had over the years was:
My SSL cert expiring (not really a Jellyfin issue).
My FireTV updated the Jellyfun app to a version that no longer supported the server version, this was pretty frustrating becuase I just wanted to sit down and watch some TV instead of messing around with a upgrade.
In saying that; Kodi also ran fine for years without issue.
My main issues with Jellyfin are scrubbing difficulties and subtitles going out of sync or not being able to change their timings, same with audio timings.
Another annoying bit on the client side, the Android app appears to choose audio tracks at random even though I have English preferred. I have all of a show ripped the same way with dual audio tracks and jellyfin can't be consistent. Plex never had this issue with this show.
I do this with audiobooks, too, but consider libro.fm instead. Same pricing last I looked, and part of my monthly subscription goes towards my local bookseller.
That said, a +1 to Prologue from me. Fantastic app.
I'll check that out. Sometimes when I'm moving between an audiobook and my kindle I use the official Audible app (WhisperSync is pretty freaking cool) which is the main reason I've kept my Audible subscription. Though there as some books I have no plan to read+listen so I'll look into libro.fm!
You can get book credits with a monthly subscription, I think when I was doing that it was about as good a deal as audible. libro.fm also has the advantage of being DRM-free from the start
Oh, right, I do the subscription, so it's $15/mo for 1 audiobook, plus 30% off further purchases. I guess I don't "audio-read" that much, so that's a good deal for me. (I actually have credits saved up, which don't expire.)
Adding a new users is harder to find than it should be. Force a particular resolution to a user (Original!) is too hard. The content they push - I don’t want it.
I don’t think it’s perfect but I don’t have the same complaints as others re: the UI. To me it’s perfectly functional.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome or I’m blind to what everyone else sees but I rarely suffer bad UI if I can help it. Plex has always just made sense to me for the most part. There have been some revisions that grated at first but as long as my media is only a few click away I’m happy.
I mean, I never said Plex was free. I paid for lifetime Plex Pass like 4+ years ago so I don’t have any ongoing costs.
I have no issue spending money (which is why I use Plex and not Emby/Jellyfin), I have a problem when you literally cannot spend any amount of money to get what I consider the best experience. Even if you pay for every streaming app on the planet you can’t get the experience Plex can provide (with media acquired legally or otherwise).
Unfortunately, the Plex experience is subpar for me. It frequently freezes, even on good connections, transcoding is low quality and doesn't use max quality even on a 600 Mbit line, and other jank.
Browsing my library and selecting videos to play is amazing, just the actual player itself is nowhere near as good as Netflix's.
If only there were a way to at least tell it "never transcode, just always play original quality". It's been years of this feature being requested, yet my server still tries to transcode.
You use Plex because you think it's easier to use than Emby/Jellyfin. It would behoove you to recognize where you have been successfully marketed to.
It's odd to reply to a thread about a piece of software that has always been FOSS, and parading the solution you paid for while saying "You can't pay for a better solution than something I've paid for!"
Jellyfin is a better solution than Plex, and you're not paying anything! Imagine that.
It’s odd to care so much that someone enjoys a piece of software they paid for even if an open source alternative exists. I have said absolutely nothing against Emby/Jellyfin, just that I personally use Plex. I even mentioned Jellyfin in my original statement on equal footing with Plex:
> You cannot pay for an experience that rivals Plex (or in this case Jellyfin).
You omitted that from your quote. I was stating that running your own media server (no matter the software) is better than using the streaming services. I use Plex so I talked about Plex. I wasn’t refuting the article, I was making a statement about how shitty streaming has gotten.
I didn't omit anything. I focused on a sentence you led with. More importantly, I definitely don't care whether or not you enjoy Plex. I left that ecosystem 4 years ago because the writing was on the wall, now Jellyfin blows it out of the water performance wise. Didn't even have to pay for the pithy Plex Pass!
> I was stating that running your own media server (no matter the software) is better than using the streaming services.
Maybe you should have stated that in the first place...? It is certainly clearer in terms of the message. Nobody said you can't talk about Plex, just that it is weird to lead with "I paid for this!" on a thread about free software that isn't what you paid for. If you didn't pay for Plex pass, your comment would fit better. If the Geerling article was about Plex, your comment would fit better, but it wasn't, and it doesn't.
Can you be more precise? I used Plex as a free user for a while before getting a Pass, and I seemed to have full control over my media - I could watch it remotely, etc.
Plex has fallen behind free alternatives, which is no surprise because they already have most people's money. You're not paying for a higher quality experience when you pay for Plex Pass. You're paying for functionality that has been free in other alternatives for awhile, like hardware transcoding.
Performance wise it's also bad compared to the competition.
I don't pay them for hardware encoding but for other services that the alternatives suck at. Once you know you have to pay you don't really care what you have to pay for and what you don't.
There are downsides to Plex, but do realize you're conversing with people who've used multiple options. I try Jellyfin once or twice a year and it's objectively a worse experience each time.
And again, when I used the free version of Plex the viewing experience was perfect. I guess I just don't need hardware encoding?
Hardware encoding and general performance are quite a lot of reasons. I don't think you're making your argument in good faith when you are clearly not pushing these systems to their limits like some of us are. There's no need to act like you've really tried running Jellyfin when you just chose the easier option and stuck with it.
[0] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/2547